Yes. Thank you for speaking the only truth in this thread.

The number 1024 is my favourite, it feels like a smooth slippery ice skating rink, with lots of room for activities.

12 is another good number, it feels like a sharp 12 pointed knife, very good at slicing things up evenly.

This number always feels like a completely full glass, one drop would overflow it.

Obesity, and bounciness.

How many eggs is a reasonable amount? Asking for a friend.

I agree. I’ve never bought an iPhone or iPad myself, but I’ve had old ones given to me.

When using an iPad (or an iPhone) the one thing to keep in mind is it’s NOT a computer. You cannot treat it like a PC, or expect it to behave like one. You cannot apply your decades of experience with PC operating systems, you need to forget what you know.

The iPad is an appliance. It is designed for consuming apps from the App Store. That’s all.

Android has been trying to do the same for years, but the benefit with Android is it’s Linux based, so we can always install a terminal emulator, and a file manager, and other admin tools that allow us to use the familiar PC patterns we’ve become accustomed to.

Okay. I’ll implement this change on Friday at 4.30pm.

The only thing I use assistant for on my phone, is asking for navigation. Eg, while driving somewhere I haven’t been before, “hey google, navigate to <address>”.

Before Gemini: Opens google maps, finds the address, starts navigation, and works perfectly.

After Gemini: “Hmm, I don’t know how to ‘navigate to’. Let me google that for you. Here are your search results for ‘navigate to <address>’, you’re welcome”.

There’s a reason people still use “CD-quality audio” to describe high fidelity music playback, it’s still the benchmark, and I feel like we are still trying to achieve it again after being lost in the woods of MP3 compression and Bluetooth earphones for the last 20 years.

I have autism, and I always thought this was a symptom of my autism, but after researching it recently it seems that most others with autism are the opposite, they need background noise or music to concentrate.

I have industrial deafness, that is an audio processing disorder that is associated with background noise. This also affects my reading.

If there is any form of background noise, I can’t understand speech. Eg, if I turn the air conditioner on in the living room, then I can’t understand what’s said on the TV, even at reasonable volume levels. Turing the volume up can help, but not a lot.

If I’m standing next to the fridge and you walk up to talk to me, I can see your mouth moving, I can hear your words, but I can’t understand anything, the small noise of the fridge compressor completely wipes out my comprehension.

If we are in a busy cafe with lots of people talking at once, I can’t understand the staff when they ask to take my order, even if they are right in front of me, speaking clearly directly at me. It’s like my brain can only concentrate on the background noise and it has no processing power left to interpret foreground words.

This is the same with reading and writing. I am a software engineer, so I spend all day writing code. Many of my colleagues like to listen to music while they work. I cannot. If I put on music, then I can no longer write. Nothing comes out. My mind is blank, concentrating on listening to the music. Even instrumental background music affects me.

So to answer your question, I can’t read with background noise. Perhaps you could check if you have a form of industrial deafness too.

I carry a jailbroken Kobo with wifi disabled. That solves most of the issues you have described here. I sideload DRM-free ebooks. I can’t stand reading text on my phone’s LCD screen (and OLED is worse), but eink screens are totally different, my eyes like them.

Does not need external light either

Lamps exist

That’s exactly what external light means. If you need to sit near a lamp to read your book, then you are relying on external light.

Btw, I agree with the point in general you’re trying to make. Physical books and physical note taking still have a place and are often gone forgotten and underutilized. They can promote greater information retention, due to the tactile experience being mixed into the reading/writing experience.

I used to love doing this too, until I realised that helping someone build a PC is the same as signing them up for a lifetime of tech support for free.

“I bought a new printer and plugged it in and it’s not working? Why doesn’t it work? You built the PC, it’s your fault.”

“My ISP told me I need a new wifi router, so I plugged in the new one they sent, now my PC doesn’t have any internet. You built the PC, why doesn’t it work?”

“My colleague told me I need to upgrade my antivirus so I got a Norton subscription, I installed it and now I can’t receive any emails. Come and fix it, you built the PC.”

All 3 of these are real experiences I’ve had. There are countless more. These days I say “I’d love to help you build a PC, but it’s been 15 years since I’ve used windows, I don’t really know how to install it or set it up or use it. I’d be happy to build a PC with a Linux based OS for you.” By that time they’re already finding someone else.

(dimming my bedroom lights)

Thats terrifying. Your desk outlet should not share a circuit with your bedroom lighting circuit, that makes no sense (unless you’re talking about a desk lamp).

And regardless, if a 700W load can make your lights dim, then there’s a major wiring issue in your house. Don’t plug in an electric cooker, kettle, or space heater until you get that checked out.

If I’m reading that correctly, that shows the system is drawing around 100W just sitting idle.

Something is not right there.

Either the power meter is way out of calibration, or there is a configuration issue with your PC. Maybe you have a performance setting that is causing the CPU and GPU to not idle down ever? Or a rogue antivirus software that is cranking the CPU constantly?

Are there any spinning disk hard drives in your PC? They can sometimes use around 5W each on idle. That was the biggest cause of idle power consumption on my old xeon server, with 8 HDDs.

PSU choice can also affect it. Eg, if you buy into marketing and buy a monster 850W PSU, but it’s idle all the time and only uses 450W under load, then the PSU is spending the whole time outside it’s efficiency curve, and can end up causing more power draw than expected.

That makes sense, thanks!

I always thought it was “this differs from that” and “it’s different than that”.

You’re wrong. In this expression, the “quiet” part means the “unsaid” part. If someone tells you a secret, and they say “please keep that quiet”, it means “don’t tell anyone”. If you’re driving in the car and the kids are being rowdy in the back seat, you would say “keep quiet back there”, it means “shut your mouth”.

To say the quiet part out loud, means “you said the thing you intended to keep unsaid”.

I’ve only been to another country once in my life. In 2018 I was invited to present at a scientific conference held in Sicily, and my workplace sponsored my travel and accommodation costs.

After 6 days there, my takeaway was an unfavorable view of the local Sicilian people. This is obviously not representative of every person in Sicily, or Italians in general (Italy is a big place with lots of different regions), but I’m not in a hurry to go back to Palermo.

RRTANGENTABACUS

I know it primarily as a cheat code in Star Wars pod racer on N64, but I’ve seen it in other games too, and even referenced in different non-gaming contexts. I still don’t really know what it means.

When I was a kid I remembered it as “RR-Tan-Genta-Bacus”. It wasn’t until decades later I realised it is real words “tangent”, “abacus”.